Porn is a $100 billion industry, with the US market alone hogging 13 of those billions. Considering how much money is being squirted around, why would you not ask yourself, How to start a porn site in 2024?

To help you take a hefty bite out of the industry’s ripe ass cheeks, this article will cover:

As you might expect, the guide is a monster on par with the snake in Danny D’s trousers. If you can’t spare the time or effort to read through the whole thing, we’ve included a quick summary below.

How to Start a Porn Site — Quick Summary

To launch your porn business and get your site out there, you’ll need the following:

  • A script or theme — always preferable to building a whole-ass website from zero, with PornX being a particularly great choice
  • A domain — check your options here
  • A hosting plan — typically an adult VPS or server, depending on whether you’ll be embedding or hosting videos (explained later)

For reference, if you’re embedding, you’ll want a VPS with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, such as our Mischievous Noble plan. If you’re hosting videos, though, you’ll require a server with at least 1 TB of space, like our Gladius server.

Next, once your website is online, you’ll need to populate it with some smutty content. Unless you’re an adult performer (or willing to become one), that typically means downloading quite a bit of porn.

If any of this seems complicated, there’s no need to get discouraged. Just reach out to our support team — they’ll gladly help you with any of the above.

And if you’re determined to plunge balls-deep into the porn game, Vicetemple’s adult turnkey solution will be the sweetest deal you can get. As the name implies, we’ll get your website ready — SEO and content plan included — and hand you the key.

How to Start a Porn Site: The Complete Guide

With the summary out of the way, let’s plunge balls-deep into the juicy meat of our guide on starting a porn website.

Why Start A Porn Site?

Without exaggerating, porn is everywhere. The world is obsessed with sex, and wherever you turn, you see tits and ass.

For fuck’s sake, a Pornhub ad was even on Times Square before some cockblocker decided to ruin everyone’s fun.

If you have doubts, though, here are some numbers:

In such a sex-centered society, porn is a hot commodity (pun intended). It’s the great equalizer, letting regular Joes and Janes make money comparable to larger businesses.

You don’t even have to be a model. With some planning and a bit of work, anyone can earn stupid amounts.

For example, this guy Adrian has been bringing home around $100 a day for over 3 years with video porn sites alone. In other words, he’s killing it with six figures, having earned $104,500 in 2017.

You can do it, too — by starting a porn site! Let’s begin by listing your options.

Types Of Porn Sites To Start

The porn industry is one throbbing giant, with more flavor than anyone can imagine. From erotic birthday parties featuring lesbian midget fairies to latex nuns getting abducted (and anally probed) by aliens — we’ve seen it all.

There is a method to the madness, though.

We’ve helped our clients launch thousands of porn sites and identified 16 distinct website types in the adult industry. However, while our clients do love their work, not all of those sites are good choices when you’re looking to start a porn site; especially if you’re new to the industry.

Unless you’re a model yourself, we suggest the following:

Let’s take an in-depth look at each.

1. Free Porn Sites

Free porn sites are most people’s first choice when it comes to rubbing one out. As the most popular smut hubs out there, they’re getting the highest chunk of traffic in the industry.

Yep, nothing beats getting home after a hard day’s work, hopping over to your favorite free porn site, unzipping, and letting nature run its course.

Pretty much everyone enjoys them, and they’re possibly the easiest type of porn site to start and build on. So, as you might expect, there’s a ton of them around.

Most run on a hybrid model, featuring both free and paid content. Completely free porn sites do exist and thrive, though.

One such example is BaddiesOnly which is currently averaging around $15,000 in monthly revenue. As a cherry on top, they’re doing it despite most ad networks not wanting anything to do with them due to their extreme content.

Of course, you won’t have to decide between the two right off the bat. In fact, launching a completely free site, growing it, then adding premium options is a tried-and-true way to succeed.

Let’s take a look at the many advantages and few disadvantages of free porn sites.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Porn Sites

Advantages Disadvantages
  •  Easy access to HD and 4K video content
  • Simple to start and easy to grow
  • Convenient and varied monetization (covered later)
  • Easy to build thanks to premade website themes
  • Relatively cheap to start, especially if you embed content
  • High competition
  • Potentially expensive to host as your video catalog grows
  • Require a ton of content
  • Heavily dependent on ads for revenue, which can negatively affect your SEO

2. Premium Porn Sites

These are your Netflix and Hulu of the porn industry. And unlike those two, premium porn sites don’t have to try to be diverse — they’ve got everything from trans representation to black reparations.

On a more serious note, premium porn sites almost entirely consist of gated content. There might be a teaser here and there, but whoever wishes to partake in their charms will need to pay the toll.

As such, eager spenders will make up most of the traffic on premium porn sites. They don’t get as much attention as their free cousins, but they do get more of what really matters: money.

Let’s shed some more light on what’s great and not-so-great about them.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Premium Porn Sites

Advantages Disadvantages
  • Great earning potential
  • Steady cash flow
  • Not reliant on adult ad networks, their payout terms, schedules, etc.
  • Easy promotion (just upload watermarked snippets of your content to free porn sites)
  • Website themes make it easy to include features such as a store, streaming integration, payment processors, and more
  • Relatively low hosting expenses, as premium porn sites don’t have to feature as much content as free ones
  • Relatively slow growth (due to so much porn going around for free)
  • Branding is crucial; a premium website needs to have a premium feel for clients to be willing to pay for it
  • Require high-quality, harder-to-find content such as rare footage, behind-the-scenes videos, etc.
  • Need payment processor integration and (likely) business registration to accept payments

Whichever of the two options you go with, Vicetemple’s adult turnkey solution will be your best starting point.

Starting A Porn Site – Step By Step

The steps below will set you on the course toward starting a successful porn site. For the most part, they’ll be identical for free and premium sites, with the main differences concerning content sourcing and monetization (steps 5 and 6).

Step 1. Choose A Niche (and Microniches)

Anyone wishing to start a porn site should begin by picking a potential niche, then choose one or more microniches.

Sure, Pornhub and the like may service every kink known (and unknown) to man, but they’ve got a fair bit of mileage over anyone else. You won’t beat them at their game because they, simply put, play it better.

If you just follow the buckshot method (meaning posting everything you find), all you’ll get will be a bigger hosting bill and a spot on Google’s prestigious page 169.

Needless to say, that’s not a great way to get organic traffic.

Instead, you’ll want to establish your site as something distinctive; one of the few places where a certain kind of content can be found. That way, search engines will work for you instead of against you.

And in a fast-growing market like porn, that’ll make the difference between striking big and striking out.

For best results, pick one broad niche and three microniches. The microniches will help you snag dedicated fans, while the broad niche will ensure steady growth.

And as your site gains traction, you’ll be able to add more microniches or go hard on your main niche.

To illustrate, let’s say that you wish to focus on the cosplay niche. Realistically, you won’t be able to rank for all kinds of cosplay when you’re just starting out, and that’s where microniches come in.

There are more of these than anyone can list, so you’ll have plenty to choose from. Off the top of our heads, cosplay can revolve around:

  • The type of fandom (anime cosplay, video game cosplay, etc.)
  • The performers’ race or ethnicity (Black cosplay, Japanese cosplay, etc.)
  • The performers’ gender or sexuality (lesbian cosplay, trans cosplay, etc.)
  • The performers’ build (busty cosplay, petite cosplay, etc.)

… and much, much more.

Let’s assume that you start with anime cosplay, video game cosplay, and Japanese cosplay. You’d get content that falls within those three niches, then build your site up from there.

Now, let’s see how you can decide on your broad niche and microniches.

Use Major Porn Sites for Research

Write what you know, professional authors say.

Similarly, we’d advise any new porn site owner to start by uploading content from a niche they themselves enjoy.

By doing so, you’ll know what fans of that particular genre will appreciate. Just as importantly, you’ll avoid burnout by having your work revolve around something you like.

That being said, focusing on what you’re into is by no means mandatory. If money wasn’t one hell of a motivator, we wouldn’t have porn in the first place.

Whatever you choose to go with, though, you can’t go wrong by researching it on a major porn site. Let’s say, for instance, that you wish to look into cosplay porn on XVideos.

Of course, you’d start by visiting the site, clicking the search bar, and typing in cosplay. Right before hitting that search button, though, you’d see the most popular related terms and the number of videos for each.

That’s the data you’d be looking for.

These are ranked by relevance and popularity, yet their respective numbers of videos don’t follow a pattern.

That means that, for example, Japanese cosplay is more popular than lesbian cosplay despite not having as many videos. Therefore, it’s less saturated — and a better potential niche for your website.

By repeating this process, you could narrow down your search and get a good idea about what’s popular yet unsaturated. The higher up a result is and the fewer videos it has, the better!

On an unrelated note, a popular website’s tag page is an exceptional way to learn what goes and what doesn’t. If you can find something on XVideos, chances are that a decent number of people will be into it!

Check Exact Search Volume

To truly learn if a niche would be a decent choice for your new porn site, you’ll have to dig deeper. And no, we’re not referring to what Johnny Sins does to his co-stars.

What we mean is that you should find the number of people searching for the aforementioned terms, per month.

The Ahrefs SEO Toolbar or Semrush will come in handy with that. We suggest trying them both out and picking the one you prefer — the latter isn’t free but offers a 7-day trial.

After running cosplay porn through it, we see that the term gets 332,000 monthly search queries on average with the keyword difficulty of 18 (out of 100). With some optimization, a porn site covering this niche could have that many monthly visitors.

You could narrow down your niche even further, though. While doing so would temporarily limit your audience somewhat, you’ll also find it much easier to get an initial following.

For instance, fortnite cosplay porn, genshin impact cosplay porn, and japanese cosplay porn have volumes of 1900, 4900, and 9000, respectively. However, all of them have considerably lower ranking difficulties, which stand at 0, 1 and 3, respectively.

As this quick research tells us, cosplay porn holds quite a bit of money shot potential. They’re not too saturated and there is a solid amount of demand for their content.

In practical terms, that means that digging into one of the aforementioned niches would be a great idea. If you can find a good amount of relevant porn and upload it to your website, it’ll be a big step on your way to success.

Determine Niche Competitiveness

If you wish to learn how hard a keyword is to rank for on Google, a tool like Ahrefs is a good start. Just run it, plug the keyword(s) you wish to check into its Keyword Explorer, and note the keyword difficulty number.

Anything below 30 is generally considered a low-difficulty niche and will be well worth considering. For a new porn site, though, you’ll want something closer to 10.

And if you happen to find a niche with keyword difficulties lower than 5, treasure it like the gold mine it is.

However, keep in mind that these results are not always 100% accurate.

Instead, the difficulty index they provide is merely a rough estimate. And contrary to popular belief, a highly competitive niche can actually be a good thing.

But if you want to start a porn site and stay on the safe side, just pick a porn niche with relatively little competition and decent search volume. It’s a reliable way to make easy money.

Step 2. Find A Domain Name

How-To-Start-An-Escort-Business-And-Choose-Domain-Name

Now that you’ve picked a niche, it’s time to brainstorm a catchy porn domain. Given that a bad one could lead to your site getting forgotten, this is extremely important.

Picking a domain name should be a marathon lovemaking session with a satisfying climax; not a quickie. And to help you reach that climax, we’ve put together the tips below.

5 Tips for Choosing a Porn Domain Name

When you’re picking a domain name to start a porn site, you should consider the following.

1. Purchase a .com When Available

If you can, always slap .com at the end. After all, if 47.8% of the known internet uses it, it’s gotta be good.

But seriously, consumers prefer seeing this domain extension, and they tend to trust such websites more.

If you’re in doubt, here’s a list of the top five most-visited porn domains in the world, right now:

  1. xvideos.com
  2. pornhub.com
  3. xnxx.com
  4. xhamster.com
  5. stripchat.com

Is it a coincidence that all of them end in .com? It’s not, but as we’ll soon explain, you won’t necessarily have to go with that option.

2. Consider Not Going With .Com

Believe it or not, exceptions to the .com rule do exist.

For instance, if you wish to target a specific country, using that country’s extension is always an option — such as .de for Germany.

It’s cheaper and more accessible than .com and will tell your audience that you specifically want their attention.

As a much more amusing alternative, you could get a porn-specific domain extension — such as .xxx, .adult, and so on. Even if the .com version of your idea is taken, the adult-friendly domain version is probably available.

Let’s say that you want to use CosplayMaid.com, but it’s already booked. Instead, you could go with CosplayMaid.porn, and keep the message the same while making it even sexier.

Checking if a domain-extension pairing is available is easy. Just head over to our Domains page, type in your idea, and you’ll know what’s free within seconds.

3. Experiment With Wordplay

While .com domains are not mandatory, especially when you’re just starting out, they are definitely the better option.

Luckily, you can get one without having to resort to word salad — just use a bit of wordplay.

For instance, RadicalJizzlam.com is a merger of words you’ll never find elsewhere. That means that they didn’t have to pay a lot for their domain and wound up with an instantly (some would say radically) recognizable brand.

This trick works just as well if you’re not going with .com, as Just.xxx is a popular porn site despite using a different extension. The name tells you exactly what to expect — just XXX content — and the site delivers it with style.

4. Think About Branding

The good thing about trying to brand a porn website is that you’re free to have fun, think outside the box, and try what wouldn’t fly in other industries. Here are just some branding factors that you can consider when launching a porn site:

Your porn brand name doesn’t need to have real meaning! Google and YouTube have no specific meanings, and neither do XNXX and xHamster.

Be unique. There’s tons of copycats in the online porn space, and if you’re one of them, you’ll likely be forgotten. Don’t follow suit; stand out from the herd by coming up with an interesting name, tagline, logo, color scheme, graphic design, etc. Just take our example. Do we look like any other website you’ve seen while researching how to start a porn site?

Make your brand name easy to remember. Keep your domain name short, simple, and not too wordy. With names, less is always more, and a brief one is easy to remember when most of your blood’s elsewhere.

5. Use Thesaurus.com And UrbanDictionary.com

Of course, coming up with a unique and interesting website name is easier said than done. On the bright side, the internet is full of helpful resources such as Thesaurus.com and UrbanDictionary.com.

Just visit one of those, type in a word, check out the relevant terms, and see where the search takes you.

Then, all you’ll need is some creative tweaking, and you’ll eventually wind up with something truly memorable.

For instance, one synonym for a hot woman is vixen, which also means female fox.

Put that x into a threesome, add sexy as an adjective, and you wind up with sexyvixxxens.com — a perfect domain for either a vanilla or furry porn site.

Similarly, bush often stands for vagina, whether or not it’s actually hairy. Combine it with a synonym for sex like hammering or whacking, and you get bushwhackers.com, which is a great domain name.

Likewise, ass cheeks are commonly referred to as buns. Join it with thicc for fat, and you get thiccbuns.porn.

You can come up with something similar, or perhaps even better. All you need is time, so why hesitate?

Grab a pen and paper, turn off that porn you’ve got playing in the other tab, and start brainstorming some ideas!

How To Start A Porn Site - Choose a Domain Name

Step 3. Get Adult Web Hosting

Most porn newbies assume they can just google porn hosting, go with a popular company, and enjoy smooth sailing.

Unfortunately, that’s not how things work, even if they hire a provider that supposedly allows all legal porn.

You see, mainstream hosting companies are very vague about porn. They may accept adult content, but does that mean that the content on their servers will always be available?

Fuck no — you can face service interruptions, resource limits, or even content takedowns. And whenever one of those happens, your viewers will get a little bit less happy.

That’s why you’ll need a very specific hosting provider when you’re looking to start a porn site. Let’s get into what that means.

What To Look For In An Adult Hosting Company

How To Start A Porn Site - Featured Image

Favorable Location

We may live in a globalized society, but where you keep your servers is still very important. That is the case because each country’s laws apply to all their businesses.

And due to the universal dick punch known as the DMCA, any US-based hosting company will take down infringing content as soon as someone raises a complaint. The same is true for Canada and the UK.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, your content could get taken down even if no one legally owns it.

All it takes is one complaint — possibly even from a rival porn site — and it’ll be gone.

That’s why anyone researching how to start a porn site will want an offshore web hosting company like Vicetemple. With servers located primarily in the Netherlands (where even Pornhub keeps its sites), we’ll protect your content like condoms shield your health.

If you prefer going with another company, though, we suggest making sure that their servers are located in one of the following:

  • The Netherlands
  • Iceland
  • Luxembourg
  • Romania
  • Bulgaria
Computing Resources

Media-heavy websites (including porn sites) tend to have relatively high hardware requirements.

If you don’t have the processing power or bandwidth to handle the amount of traffic you’ll get, your site will spend more time down than up. And that’s just as bad online as it is in the bedroom.

Now, while no one can predict exactly how much juice (pun intended) you’ll need, we can tell you that you’ll likely require a VPS. For reference, most of our clients have reported great results starting their porn sites with Mischievous Noble.

We get that it’s tempting to try a lean hosting plan or go with a cheap provider, especially when you’re just starting out. After all, no one likes spending money they don’t have to.

However, doing so will typically bite you in the ass, and not in a sexy way.

Not only will you constantly be worried about whether your site is online, but when it does go down, you’ll likely lose viewers.

We wouldn’t say it’s worth it — but hey, you do you.

Security and WhoIs Privacy

When you’re planning to start a porn site, you should never overlook data safety and personal privacy. You’ll be handling people’s credit card information, and a security breach could be impossible to recover from.

Therefore, make sure that your hosting company never overloads its servers and doesn’t allow any phishing or scam-related sites. Also, you’ll want a company that owns, maintains, and regularly monitors its hardware for security.

Hosting providers that rent their servers from larger companies won’t have physical access to them. If an issue comes up, they’ll either fix it slowly, or they won’t be able to address it at all.

WhoIs privacy protection and DDoS protection are also imperative — our domains come with the former built in, and our plans offer the latter at no additional cost.

Get both, and you’ll go a long way in shielding your anonymity and keeping your website secure.

A Competent, In-House Support Team

If tech specs are dick length, support quality is the ability to keep it up. And as you might imagine, the former won’t take you far without the latter.

Well, nowadays, most big companies are using AI chatbots, which are about as useful as thongs in a gangbang.

And if you do manage to reach an actual human, they’ll likely be part of a third-party support team from a third-world country. Thus, they’ll take longer to resolve even trivial issues, as you’ll rarely talk with a hosting company employee.

To provide you with the support you need to start a porn site, we employ 100% in-house staff. They’re all human, too, or at least they were the last time we checked.

And if you’re unsure about a company, you can always look up their customer reviews. In case you’re wondering, ours are as positive as Charlie Sheen’s drug tests.

3 Types of Adult Hosting Solutions

Adult hosting plans fall into three main categories with quite a bit of breathing room within each one. These are:

Let’s take a good look at each and determine your best options.

Adult Shared Hosting

How To Start A Porn Site - Adult Web Hosting

Shared hosting is the cheapest, most basic type of web hosting. These are for low-budget porn entrepreneurs and websites that likely won’t see much early traffic.

With shared hosting, your website data is on a single server alongside hundreds, potentially thousands of other sites. That’s cheap, alright, but it comes with lower processing speed, memory, storage space, and monthly bandwidth.

Is Shared Hosting a Good Choice for a Porn Site?

Running a porn site with shared hosting is like trying to please a size queen with a two-incher.

In short, it’s not gonna happen.

Even if we ignore the potential troubles with traffic fluctuation and security risks, shared hosting will limit you in other ways.

Most notably, if you wish to use a website theme — most do when starting a porn site — you probably won’t be able to. The vast majority of themes require a VPS, and they won’t even install on a shared server.

And if you can’t skip the costs of web development with one of those, what’s the point of going cheap?

Do yourself a favor; get a VPS, avoid a headache, and grant your future porn site the solid base it deserves.

Adult Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

How To Start A Porn Site - Adult VPS

These plans store data on semi-dedicated, software-based servers.

Essentially, VPS hosting splits a single dedicated server into several virtual ones.

While the idea may sound similar to shared hosting, a VPS is several times more powerful than any such plan. The technology allocates separate resources to each individual VPS, meaning that what you pay for isn’t shared — it’s yours alone.

Is VPS Hosting Right for Porn Sites?

A VPS is likely the best choice for anyone looking to start a porn site. They offer more power and security than anything other than a dedicated server — at a fraction of the cost.

On top of all that, a VPS plan is flexible.

For instance, if you’re expecting a traffic spike, you can upgrade your service within minutes by simply asking your provider. This is impossible with shared hosting.

Starting at $28 a month, with full root access, unlimited bandwidth, high stability, full management by our expert technicians, and more than enough resources for most porn sites, any of our adult VPS plans will take you far.

Adult Dedicated Servers

How To Start A Porn Site - Adult Servers

With an adult dedicated hosting plan, you won’t settle for part of a server — you’ll get a whole one. Your resources won’t be divided, so you’ll enjoy unparalleled storage, memory, and overall power.

As another bonus, your website won’t be sharing physical or digital space with others.

Therefore, you won’t have to worry about catching a virus from one of your server mates, which is an occasional problem with shared and VPS hosting.

Are Dedicated Servers Worth It for Porn Sites?

If you’re not just looking to start a porn site but have an established one — complete with a sizable audience — then an adult server is your ideal solution.

And if you find our default plans too expensive, we can always create a custom one for you.

Just let us know about your needs and budget, and our team will see what we can put together.

Step 4. Select A Content Management System (CMS)

When to Get a Template

As the name implies, a content management system lets you control everything on your website. It’s where you set up the design, upload videos, manage advertisements, take payments, and more.

Like dongs, tits, asses, and everything else that matters, CMSs come in all shapes and sizes.

Here’s what you’ll want yours to include when you’re starting a porn site:

Responsive design: Last year, a whopping 97% of Pornhub’s visitors accessed the site via mobile devices. If that fact tells us one thing, it’s that you can’t neglect responsiveness. When your site isn’t showing properly on smartphones, tablets, and laptops, you’re missing out on millions of customers.

Video format: A good CMS will support a variety of video formats (.mp4, .mov, .avi, .wmv, etc.). People browse the web on different devices, and if what they have can’t play your content, they won’t come back.

Video quality: With HD everywhere, it’s easy to forget that not everyone can view 1080p (or better) content without interruptions. To keep your audience growing, you’ll need a CMS that allows everything from 360p to 4k.

Luckily, our adult themes check all the aforementioned boxes — and more. And we’ve got one that’s perfectly suited for starting a porn site.

PornX — The Ideal CMS for Starting a Porn Site

PornX is a website theme for WordPress — essentially a premade site that you can customize down to the finest details. With it, you can get a porn site like Pornhub, XVideos, etc. without having to hire a programmer or designer.

How To Start A Porn Site - PornX

Admittedly, website themes are nothing new.

However, PornX is unique in the value that it provides, letting you:

  • Pick between 9 initial demos, each more stylish than the last
  • Embed or upload videos, individually or en masse
  • Fully customize the theme by accessing its source code
  • Benefit from 6 premium plugins (Broken Video Finder, Video Player, Mass Grabber, Mass Embedder, Single Embedder, Premium Plans) at no additional cost
  • Add additional servers as your website grows
  • Create premium packages
  • Feature banner and video player ads
  • Integrate payment systems such as PayPal and crypto
  • Change all of your written content for SEO or translation purposes
  • Enjoy perfect optimization for mobile and desktop devices
  • Make use of steady updates and unlimited tech support
  • Potentially request to have additional features built at extra cost

All that, and more, is yours for as little as $99. Considering that similar products go for over $400, this is one deal you won’t want to miss — grab it and start your porn site, today!

Adult Website Scripts — The Advanced Option

PornX may be the best option for most people, but that doesn’t necessarily make it everyone’s top choice. Most notably, if you’re planning on running a gigantic operation, then adult website scripts might be for you.

Admittedly, these aren’t as easy to use as your typical theme. However, experienced website managers who know their way around advanced settings will greatly enjoy their expanded functionality.

If you’d like to learn more about scripts, just drop us a message, and we’ll answer any questions you may have.

Step 5. Feature Sexy Content

Pornhub Thumbnails

Modern porn sites get their goods in four ways. Namely, you can:

  • Embed videos from other porn sites
  • Download porn, then upload it yourself
  • Let users upload videos
  • Create your own content

To no one’s surprise, free and premium porn sites have different options when it comes to these. Free porn sites can use all four methods, while premium porn sites are generally restricted to creating or downloading high-quality content.

Let’s take a good look at each method.

Embed Videos From Other Porn Sites

Embedding videos from industry giants is the easiest method on our list. If you’re looking to start a porn site with as much quality content as possible, you’ll love this approach.

Specifically, most videos on major tube sites will have embed codes. You can copy those, paste them into the right places in your website’s code, and they’ll appear for everyone to enjoy.

Embedding has two major benefits. Primarily, you’ll have access to a ton of content that you can easily add to your website.

Just as importantly, the embedded videos won’t be hosted on your server. That means that you won’t have to spend money on additional storage space as your website grows, unless you’re also adding content in other ways.

Sadly, the option does come with downsides. First off, you’ll be dependent on the sites you embedded from — if they remove a video, it’ll also be gone for you.

Second, since you’ll be embedding the whole video player, you won’t be able to use your own ads with it. As a result, you’ll be making less per video compared to the alternatives.

Understandably, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of fiddling around with their code. That’s not a problem at all, though, as PornX and certain adult scripts automate the process, making it even easier.

Download Porn, Then Upload It Yourself

The next method may be a bit controversial, but no one can call it ineffective.

Featuring other people’s work without permission surely won’t jive with everyone. The same can be said for anal sex, though, yet tons of people are bonkers for it.

There’s plenty of girth to the fine art of porn poaching, and it won’t all fit into this article. Downloading from Pornhub is a tried-and true option, and most popular porn tubes will let you do the same.

Most of the time, though, you’ll need a torrent client (such as uTorrent) and a torrent site. When it comes to the latter, we recommend:

However, if you’d like to learn more and become the Robin Hood of smut, you’ll appreciate our guide on downloading porn.

Let Users Upload Videos

Letting users upload what they have is cheap and easy, so all industry giants use it to some degree. When you finally start your porn site, you probably will, too.

Of course, this is only an option once you have a steady audience. However, when  you attract a handful of consistent uploaders, you won’t ever have to worry about fresh content.

Just throw your ads in, let people share their stuff, and watch the money roll in.

However, relying on user-uploaded smut isn’t all sunshine and dildos, as you’ll need to keep your submissions under control.

If you allow illegal content, such as child porn or actual torture on your porn website, you’ll get in trouble.

To nip those in the bud, you’ll either need to monitor uploads yourself or get someone to do it. And unless you have a partner or some horny friends with nothing better to do, that won’t be free.

If you’ve got the time to moderate your site yourself, though, you’ll essentially be making money by watching porn.

Create Your Own Content

Running your own porn site isn’t a conventional way to sell your homemade porn, but it’s a perfectly valid approach. It also comes with plenty of options.

Do you want to offer up your sex tapes, sell nudes, step into the feet genre, or go deep into fetish content? As long as you’re not filming anything illegal, you can do it all.

If you take this route, though, you’ll have two major issues to resolve: production and volume. The former comes down to creating quality work, the latter is about making enough of it.

The guides we’ve linked above will help with both, but you should keep your own limits in mind.

No one can shoot enough porn to single-handedly power a whole tube site, so you won’t want this to be your only content sourcing method.

If you’re a team player and are willing to share some spoils, though, you can solve that issue by partnering with other creators. With more of you on the job, you can keep your porn site topped off for a long time.

Despite these downsides, though, running your own porn production does come with unique perks.

For example, you can watermark your videos, upload them to major porn sites, and make money from Pornhub, XVideos, etc. while expanding your audience.

Just as importantly, you can use your porn site as a stepping stone for starting an OnlyFans.

The lack of early traction is one of the biggest problems that new OnlyFans creators face. With a starting fanbase, you can skip it entirely and go straight to the big leagues.

Step 6. Monetize Your Porn Website

How To Start A Porn Site - Monetize Your Porn Site

Running a porn site may be all fun and games, but at the end of the day, you’re in it to make money. And how you do that will depend on the type of porn site you went with.

In essence, free porn sites are entirely dependent on ad networks, while premium porn sites also sell memberships. To help you earn as much from your sexy venture as possible, this section will cover both options.

Ad Networks

Simply put, an ad network is an intermediary between you and advertisers — people who pay you for displaying their ads. And in exchange for that service, ad networks take a percentage from what you make.

As you probably imagined, they’re not 100% mandatory, but there’s a good reason that everyone’s using them.

Think about it; who’s willing to spend countless hours tracking and negotiating with advertisers? We’re not, and we’re guessing that the same goes for you.

Well, an ad network automates that process and fills your site with ads — and your wallet with money.

That being said, not just any ad network will work with a porn site. To ensure that you won’t have to look for a new one every now and then, you’ll want one that will be okay with your content and will turn a blind eye to how you got it.

In short, you’ll need an adult ad network, and we’ve got a complete guide for picking the right one. You’ve got some decent choices in that regard, but we recommend Adsterra, HilltopAds, or Clickadilla.

However, you don’t have to go with any of these — feel free to use any ad network you can find. Still, we heavily suggest that you consider the following criteria before picking one:

  • Ad format variety — what ad types does the network offer?
  • Payout options — how (and how frequently) can the network pay you out?
  • CPM — how much do they pay per 1,000 views?
  • Safety and security — did the network have any major data breaches in the past?
  • Network size — how popular are they with advertisers and publishers; how reliably can they sell your ad space?
  • Support quality — how effective is the network’s support service?
  • Available metrics, analytics, and reports — how much of their performance will they let you see?
  • Ad blocker countermeasures — can the network deliver ads to users with blockers installed?
  • Ease of use — how user-friendly is their interface?
The Optimal Ad Setup

Running a porn site is a marathon, not a sprint.

If you’re thinking that setting up as many ads as possible will get you the most money, we’ll have to burst that bubble. The idea may be tempting, but if you go through with it, you’ll just lose your initial bunch of visitors.

The more aggressive you are with ads, the harder it will be to rank up and preserve those high rankings. Simply put, overwhelming ads drive people away, negatively affecting your SEO efforts.

Instead, you’ll want to grow first and monetize later. Let visitors enjoy your website, then gradually increase ad coverage until you’re making the kind of money you’re comfortable with.

Your ad setup will ultimately depend on you, but we recommend the following ads:

  • One popunder ad per page
  • One VAST ad per video page, skippable after 5 seconds
  • Banner ads in the sidebar, below the video player, and in the footer

This way, you’ll make solid figures without sacrificing future growth. And as you gain a bigger customer base, you’ll only earn more.

Memberships and Tips

Memberships and tips are two more ways to thicken your wallet.

Memberships are the bread and butter of premium porn sites. They can make you a ton of money, but you’ll need a payment processor to accept them — we’ll go into those in the following section.

Tips aren’t exactly a steady source of income, but they’ll pile up and surprise you more often than you think. As another plus, you can have them deposited into your crypto wallet — if you have one.

Most good website themes come with both features built in, although you will need to configure them. If you’re having your website built from the ground up, though, your developer will need to create them.

And as you probably expect, that can get pricey.

Get an Adult Payment Processor

How To Start A Porn Site - Billing Processors

Porn is equal parts business and pleasure, and the most important part of the former is getting paid. If you’re running a site with memberships and tips, a payment processor will let you take care of that.

Unfortunately, that’s where things get iffy, as a mainstream one like PayPal will never be an option. Sure, you can use it for a while, but your account will get suspended as soon as they manually review your site.

Some of that negativity is justified (due to the industry’s high fraud rate), the rest is just due to stigma, but the result is the same: you’ll need an adult-friendly payment processor.

Now, here’s the bad news: to set up any adult payment processor, you’ll need to pay a high-risk registration fee. The fee is paid during setup and is mandatory for accepting VISA and Mastercard credit cards on any porn site.

Depending on where you live, the fee can go between $500 and $1000, but you’ll only pay it once. When it’s done, any of the payment processors we’ll briefly cover below will help you make the money back countless times.

To get a more in-depth look at them, the aforementioned fee, or any other payment-related topic, here’s a detailed guide.

1. CCBill

Servicing industry giants like OnlyFans and Clips4Sale, CCBill is our top pick. They are known for their high security, fraud prevention, and 24/7 tech support, letting you rest easy while they take care of business.

CCBill won’t ask for any setup or monthly fees, but you will have to pay an initial security deposit. In practice, this means that 5% of what you make over the first 26 weeks goes to them.

Based on how risky your business is, their transaction fees go from 3.9% to 14.5%.

2. PaymentCloud

PaymentCloud is easy to set up, has low rates, and offers a variety of deals tailored for many business types. They’ll work with porn sites, dropshipping, CBD, and other relatively risky ventures.

Because they’ll put together a custom rate for you, we can’t say much about their pricing. We can point out that they charge a $25 monthly processing fee, though.

Send them a message if you’d like to learn more.

3. Epoch

Epoch is user-friendly and covers most of the globe, making them an easy pick. Their most famous clients include Vixen, Naughty America, and VRPorn.

The more you earn, the less Epoch will charge you. Their fee starts at 15% when you’re making less than $5,000, then gradually goes down — typically to 13.25%.

Sadly, Epoch’s customer support isn’t the best in the biz. However, given that their system is pretty intuitive, you likely won’t have much to request.

4. Segpay

If Segpay is good enough for bigwigs like Mofos and Kink, it’ll likely be good for you — assuming that you’re from the United States, United Kingdom, or the European Union.

Sadly, they’ll only work with businesses that operate from the aforementioned territories, but they’ll process payments from anywhere. If you can use them, you’ll find them a secure and reliable choice.

Similarly to Payment Cloud, they don’t list their rates but will instead offer you a deal based on your business. To get the best possible results, provide them with as much info as possible, along with your transaction history.

5. eMerchant Broker

Created for high-risk businesses, eMerchant Broker has plenty of tools to help you thrive. Aside from many different integrations, they support multiple payment gateways, crypto, offer chargeback countermeasures, and more.

Their many perks do come with a few downsides, though. First, their fees are a bit high — 4% or more, plus $0.15 to $0.25 per transaction.

As if that wasn’t enough, they also have early termination fees. These go around $295 for 1-year contracts and $595+ for 3-year contracts.

Still, if you’re looking for advanced features, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this payment processor.

Step 7. Implement SEO

How To Start A Porn Site Performance

SEO gets you traffic, so this is where your website lives or dies. Short for search engine optimization, it is a subtle art of appeasing search engines so that they prioritize you over the competition.

To help your work get noticed, we have created a 3-step process that allows any porn site to rank up and get traffic via SEO. It all comes down to the following:

  • Keyword research
  • Planning
  • Implementation

In essence, keyword research includes using a keyword research tool (there’ll be more on those later) to check what people are searching for within your niche.

Next, you’ll plan out how to sprinkle the keywords you found all over your website — from the domain name to tags, titles, video descriptions, and more.

Finally, implementation involves putting the SEO plan to practice and populating your site with content that will help it rank. That way, interested people will organically discover your website in no time.

All the advice that we’ll offer below is built on the aforementioned process.

That being said, you won’t have to do it all on your own. Namely, you could hire professional adult SEO services or get an adult turnkey solution.

The latter option will cover keyword research and implementation, so all you’ll need to do is apply the results to your site.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the SEO equivalent of dirty talk — they make everything better — and here’s how you’ll figure out which ones to use.

Before you begin, you’ll want to come up with an initial set of terms — your seed keywords. Obviously, these should be related to your niche, and you’ll use them as the basis for everything else.

Next, run them through a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, browse through the suggestions, and group them in a spreadsheet based on search volume and difficulty. That will be important during the planning stage.

In essence, you’ll want to target lower difficulty keywords first, even if their volumes aren’t that impressive. The total volume adds up, and it’ll be useful for ranking without off-page SEO.

As a rule of thumb, anything with a difficulty over 10 shouldn’t be a priority for a new porn site. Those high-volume keywords will look tempting, but ranking for them may take you months — or even years.

Also, never forget to check the related terms, as they’ll help you make your website more topical and increase your authority within your niche. Just as importantly, they’ll help you discover new keyword ideas.

Content Planning

This is where you’ll decide what to do with the results of your research. In practice, that means determining which keywords to use for categories and tags.

You’ll start by sorting your keywords into categories based on their topics, i.e. the words they include — petite, busty, blonde, and so on. We suggest using a spreadsheet, as it’ll make everything we are about to explain quick and easy.

Once they’re sorted, pick the most high-volume keyword under each category, as long as its difficulty is under 10. This will be your category name.

For example, if you’re launching a teen-focused website and your highest petite-related keyword is sexy petite teen, you’ll want to make it into the category name. Mark it in some way.

Next, mark the variations of the category keyword that will serve as tags. These should describe different scene types that would include the type of performer that the category describes.

For instance, the category sexy petite teen could have tags like petite teen fucked, sexy petite teen blowjob, etc.

Don’t turn very long keywords such as sexy petite teen fucked after school into tags. You’ll want to leave those for video titles and descriptions.

With all this done, your plan is ready to be implemented. Keep reading to learn how to do that.

Implementation

In practice, the implementation stage revolves around taking the keywords you discovered and sorted, and using them in high-quality written content on your website.

Yes, featuring high-quality written content is the most important part of SEO.

Search engines rely on text-based content to understand what’s shown on the page. They see quality content as providing value to visitors, and they reward it with high rankings.

Sadly, having AI write your texts isn’t an option because it doesn’t work with adult content. And even if it did, you’d want to avoid it since Google and other search engines don’t like artificial works.

Therefore, your content should be human-written, but you won’t have to write it yourself if you don’t feel up to it or can’t spare the time. Outsourcing is a perfectly valid option, and big sites use it all the time.

In contrast, pasting existing content from other websites (whether or not they feature porn) is absolutely not an option.

True, industry giants may get away with it due to their size and authority. However, as a little guy, you’ll need to stand out in any way you can — and original titles and captivating descriptions are the easiest way to do that.

So, how do you put written content on a porn site? Well, if you didn’t notice, every smut stash on the net is actually full of text, including:

  • Video titles and descriptions
  • Category names and descriptions
  • Tag names and descriptions
  • Meta descriptions for each page

… and more. The better you optimize these, the higher you’ll rank on search engines, and the more visitors you’ll get.

That’s a complex process with many moving parts, though. To help you propel your site to success, we’ll cover them all.

How to Optimize Porn Site Content

You can optimize in any order, but we suggest starting with categories, doing tags, then moving on to meta descriptions and videos.

And when all that is done, you’ll want to make sure that your website URLs are up to snuff. That is why each section (aside from the one on meta descriptions) will include instructions on optimizing the relevant URLs.

Category Names, Descriptions, and URLs

As we pointed out, you’ll want to use your highest-volume keywords for category names.

For instance, if you’re featuring cosplay content and research tells you that busty Japanese cosplay is a high-volume keyword, that would be a great name for the category.

Next, you’ll need to write a description. Here are some guidelines to help you with that — they apply to video, category, and tag descriptions alike:

  • Explain what the category, tag, or video is about
  • Write them to appeal to those who are into the content in question
  • Tastefully populate them with relevant long-tail keywords
  • There is no set length, but longer descriptions will let you slide in more keywords without making word salad

Your category name will become a title at the top of that category’s page on your website. Try to keep the whole thing under 155 characters.

In the case of busty Japanese cosplay, a good page title would be Busty Japanese Cosplay Porn Videos.

As for the description, a good one for the category in question would go something like:

There’s nothing like a curvy Japanese gal to get one’s juices going — and that goes double if she’s in costume. Come and unwind with our busty Japanese cosplay videos!

When it comes to category URLs, the URL slug should just include the category in question. For example, the busty Japanese cosplay category would look like this in the address bar:

www.yourpornsite.com/busty-japanese-cosplay

Tag Names, Descriptions, and URLs

Everything we wrote about categories also goes for tags, with one major difference. Specifically, while you’d use your highest-ranking keywords for categories, you’ll create tags by using their scene-specific variants.

In the example above, a keyword like busty Japanese cosplay would be a category, while busty Japanese cosplay anal might become a tag.

Similarly, the URL for the tag busty Japanese cosplay anal would look like:

www.yourpornsite.com/busty-japanese-cosplay-anal

Meta Descriptions

Once you’ve mapped out and described your categories and tags, it’s time to write meta descriptions for each of them.

These should be between 140 and 160 characters, so keep them concise. A good way to make them is to simply take one or two particularly hot sentences from a category or tag description, trim them, and include a call to action.

Going by those pointers, a quality meta description for the busty Japanese cosplay category would be:

There’s nothing like a curvy Japanese gal to get one going — bonus points if she’s in costume. Come and unwind with our busty Japanese cosplay anal videos!

Video Titles, Descriptions, and URLs

A video title should generally be between 40 and 70 characters long. Just as importantly, it should briefly explain what’s going on in the video and include a relevant keyword.

For instance, Busty Japanese cosplay girl getting hard anal would be a good title with the busty Japanese cosplay keyword.

On the other hand, a video description should explain what’s going on in the video in more detail. This is where you’ll have an advantage if you start a porn site around a niche you actually enjoy — you’ll know what your audience will want to hear.

Resist the urge to sell a video for what it isn’t. A viewer that gets tricked into watching a supposedly thick cosplay video that actually features a petite model won’t be pleased.

The best video URLs include their titles — or their shortened versions if the titles are particularly long. For example, a video called Asa Akira getting banged over a chair would have an optimized URL like:

www.yourpornsite.com/asa-akira-getting-banged-over-a-chair

Keep Publishing Fresh Content

To maintain your ranking on search engines, make sure to regularly publish new stuff (Google likes frequently updated websites) and keep the fresh content optimized. That way, you’ll stay on top for a long time.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to work on the site every day — you can give it your attention just once or twice a week. In that case, though, you’ll want to schedule regular content releases.

Ideally, you’ll arrange new content for publishing each day of the week. If that’s not an option, at least make sure to have new videos up each weekend.

The more you stick to a regular schedule, the sooner your content will be indexed and start ranking.

Step 8: Promote Your Porn Site

A porn site is like a good cock — if you don’t flaunt it, no one’s going to see it. To prevent such a sad outcome, you’ve got a number of options.

First, you can reupload to popular porn sites. This includes the following:

  • Download an unwatermarked video within your niche that isn’t owned by a major porn studio like BangBros, Blacked, etc.
  • Crop out a few seconds or minutes from the video (for instance, bring it down from 8:49 to 8:15)
  • Edit the video to display your website’s logo or URL
  • Grab a sexy thumbnail that accurately portrays the scene
  • Come up with a niche-related title with 7-10 accurate tags
  • Upload the video to a major porn site, such as SpankBang, EroMe or Motherless; don’t go over 10 uploads a day or you might get banned
  • Embed the video to your porn website
  • Sit back and see new visitors pop up — you’ll also earn a few bucks from the ad revenue!

Next, you can exchange links with other porn sites. Just visit a directory like NaughtyClub, find new (or mid-tier) websites, drop them a message, and offer to help each other out.

Third, putting together and publishing teasers or video clips on social media platforms that allow NSFW content (like Twitter or Reddit) will always bring you more exposure.

Fourth, you can always simply buy links on adult industry resources or porn directories like the above-mentioned Porn Dude. It may not be free, but it sure as hell works.

We’ve put these last, and for good reason. While you’d always do well to cover all your legal bases, leaving them for later is also not that big of a deal.

It may seem weird, but we’ve worked with porn sites for well over a decade, and none of our clients have ever had legal troubles as long as they followed our Prohibited Content list.

That being said, legal pages are present on all porn sites, and we strongly suggest including them on yours. They typically include:

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Age verification gate
  • Content Removal page
  • Refund Policy and Cancellation Policy, if you’re running a premium porn site

They’re important because they’ll help you cover your ass in case a user decides to break the law when accessing your site.

For instance, if a minor uses it after agreeing to the conditions on the age verification gate, the fault is no longer yours.

Conveniently, PornX comes with all the legal content built into its default structure. It’s a shake-and-bake thing; as soon as your site goes online, so will your legal pages.

And of course, you’ll have complete freedom in changing those pages to fit your needs.

Bonus Tip: Reinvest the Revenue

While the idea of taking the money and running might be tempting, you’ll typically see much better results if you reinvest. Then, once your site reaches decent revenue levels, you’ll be all set for decades or more.

As for what those decent levels are, we’d say around $10,000 per month. It may seem like much, but if you follow the advice from this guide, those numbers will be reachable within 18 to 24 months.

So, what should you reinvest into?

Simply, anything that will make your site stand out. Otherwise, it will fade from visitors’ memories like a bland porn flick.

Some key elements that you’ll want to customize include:

  • Logo
  • Navigation bar
  • Color scheme
  • Page layout and organization
  • Ad placement

Luckily, PornX is fully modable, and you can customize it to your heart’s content. If you’re not confident in your skills, though, you can always hire an adult web designer to make it truly spectacular.

Words Of Caution

Starting a porn site is like working toward a mind-blowing orgasm — you can’t rush it. That’s why you shouldn’t be surprised if it takes a while for you to start making money.

It’s hard to say how much time could pass before your project takes off. As a rule of thumb, though, if you upload 20-30 videos a day (around 2-4 hours of work), you should start seeing some dough after a few months.

Even if it’s $40 in ad money, that’s still passive revenue. And as our guide on starting a porn business can confirm, this is a long game with huge potential rewards.

Conclusion

Congrats! Now you’ve got everything it takes to grab the porn industry by the short and curlies and make a bukkake-full of money.

To make sure that you don’t miss anything, though, here’s a quick checklist. You’ll want to:

  1. Choose a niche
  2. Find a domain name
  3. Get adult web hosting
  4. Select a content management system
  5. Feature sexy content
  6. Monetize your porn website
  7. Implement SEO
  8. Promote your porn site
  9. Consider the legal matters

If you can swing all that, you’ll be rolling in cash like Rocco Siffredi is rolling in pussy. And if you still have any questions, just point them our way, and we’ll help you out.